Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 10

  “You blew up your own apartment?” Johnson said, his face gaping wide in disgust.

  “Hell no,” I said. “A couple of hundred people live in that building.” So I continued to watch the rain of debris around the building in amazement. Which was when I saw the reflected upper torsos and heads of three guys on the rooftop a couple of buildings to the east of my building. They had a long tube of some kind. They’d fired something through the window of my place, something with the approximate power of a Hellfire missile. For all I knew, it was a Hellfire. Or a LAWS rocket. No, the barrel was too long. A Chinese bazooka perhaps. The kind of thing somebody who supervised the shipments of large amounts of drugs might want to have handy, say in case it was an exchange on the open water someplace down around the Baja Peninsula. Or maybe a mile or so past the San Pedro breakwater. You went south on the deal, they burned you right there in the water.

  One of the guys on the roof pointed in my direction. A spotter raised his scope. I flipped him the bird. He flipped me back. The guy with the tube bent down. Maybe to get another rocket.

  “I guess I’m not heading for Memphis,” I said, hurrying around to the back of the van and climbing in, Johnson squealing the tires before I could even get the doors closed, his U-turn nearly throwing me back into the street as he jumped the curb at McDonald’s and found the safety of intervening structures to shield us from the rocket.

  As I said before, I was damned. But apparently, Hell needed company, and I was appointed to bring a few extra souls with me.

  Johnson rounded the turn onto Alameda and slowed down. Already we could hear the sirens of whatever engine company was the closest. And people were coming out of their rat hole tenements, drawn by the shockwave and the subsequent fire. They shouldn’t come out. The smart ones stay inside and pray rosaries. This night, there were few smart ones.

  “Kill the lights and pull into this next alleyway,” I said, pointing to the one which ran past a brick-faced cold storage building.

  “Naw, let’s get out of here,” Johnson said.

  “Then drop me off,” I said.

  “No. You’re not going to shame me with those childish tactics.” He doused the lights and we entered the alley, which was deserted, and black as Erebus, save for the light from a rising February moon, combined with the flames of my old apartment, which reminded one of the glow of a campfire. I could almost taste the weenies and the marshmallows as they were eaten, half raw, half charcoal, straight from the coat hanger.

  We were half a block into the alley when we saw it. The white van similar to ours was parked about where I thought it would be. The modern Russian mafia. The same guys who used to pull up in the middle of the night in Moscow and take Granny to the torture cells, where they left her wet from their piss, naked in a subzero concrete vault until she finked on all her grandchildren. Now they were here, taking drugs to Granny’s grandchildren at the better schools. No black cars, no KGB tactics, no fanfare. Just white vans.

  The sirens were increasing. Judging by the way the presence of our duly constituted legal authorities would be soon felt, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the rooftop rocket man and his companions would be coming out to drive away and live to fight another day. But I had other plans. Johnson, not needing to be told anything, killed the engine and coasted our white van until we were about a hundred yards back of their white van. I took out the big Bowie knife.

  “You’ll need more than that,” Johnson said, reaching down for the shotgun.

  “No I won’t. But I may need your driving skills to save my sorry behind. Wait here.”

  The alley, save for the other white van, was deserted, devoid even of sleeping winos. There weren’t as many winos in the alleys as used to be in the old days. Ever since the baby gang-bangers began their initiation into the gang by hunting for derelicts and pumping nine-millimeter shells into their alcohol soaked carcasses. No, the winos had moved to higher ground, or perhaps you could say lower ground, preferring the labyrinthine accommodations of the tunnels running underneath Union Station, a place even a baby gang-banger feared to tread, lest he find himself on the wrong end of a homemade Molotov cocktail, tossed expertly and without remorse by the soberest of the lot who hung out down there.

  I was always good at sneaking up on my victims and tonight was no exception. The driver, the guy in the red T-shirt, had loaded Gregor into the back of the van and was resting from this Herculean labor, smoking some brand of stinky cigarette I couldn’t identify, something perhaps only Russian mafia types enjoyed, made of Cuban tobacco from the glory days of their ties with our less fortunate neighbors south of Florida.

  His window was down, and he had the engine idling, perhaps thinking it might be the thing for a quick getaway, what with his friends on the roof having just fired a rocket into my apartment. I could imagine what he must be thinking. That he had a payday coming, and what he would do with the money. First, a night in a City famous for it’s velvety, sinful pleasures. There would be a lot of bragging and better brands of booze and perhaps a touch of two-hit Colombian laced with crack. And a whole lot of other stuff. After which, during regular business hours, there would be a trip to a better jeweler to buy something for his young Russian wife to make up for the fact he didn’t come home for a couple of nights.

  I almost hated to interrupt the guy. I was sure what was going through his mind was a lot better than what was about to happen in the here and now, in the flesh. I almost hated to, but on the other hand, the guy and his friends had just fired a rocket into my apartment. Never mind that I had moved out and turned the place over to an animal. The rules were the rules. If I say a thing is forbidden in my house, then it’s forbidden. I can complain about my Granny. You can’t. I can explode a rocket in my apartment. You can’t.

  So I sneaked up the alley to the driver’s side of the van. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it, the objective being to avoid the inevitable spray of blood which naturally occurs when the head is most of the way severed from the body. O.J., in spite of all the play acting he’d done in the movies, had not learned the technique, which was why forensics had found a bloody handprint on the rear gate, as well as a ton of blood in the shower drain at Brentwood, and elsewhere.

  I had excellent technique, most days. But when the van driver felt my index finger rammed through his ear, and his lower jaw caught hooked by a powerful thumb which jerked his head outside the window, his cigarette flew from his mouth into my hair. I keep my hair close cropped, military style and felt the burn on my scalp instantly. I had to shake the thing off me, and by the time I did, the guy had fumbled open his door in an attempt to ram me with it, whilst at the same time, his other hand brought forth the Glock 9 he’d apparently kept hard by for precisely this situation. The guy should have been headless already, but my technique had been interfered with and moved to another plane entirely.

  One must adapt or be removed from the trial and error experimentation such as life is. So I adapted, without thinking about it too much. Which is my edge. I don’t think about it. I let my animal brain handle the task. That way there’s no need for a second processing by the brain for the message to kill. Just in through the eyes, down to the dorsal root ganglion, and back to the necessary muscles, all at the speed of about 186,000 miles per second. The guy in the van was thinking, and going slower than I was. So when I reached through the open car door, past the guy’s face and met his oncoming gun-wielding hand with a heavy upward slash of the Bowie, severing almost completely the gun hand at the wrist, the guy released a tremendous whoosh of air which nearly blew me down with the smell of garlic. He’d had a lot of it, and recently.

  It’s an ugly thing what a big man with a sharp knife can do. So ugly, entire juries have been known to request a recess from the room after the prosecutor shows them the photos. When I sliced through his neck clean to the rear of his spinal cord, it was an ugly th
ing, save for one redeeming feature. I’d decided not to sever the cord. I think it’s because I know the shockwave from the severed spinal cord blacks out the brain completely. I didn’t want to black him out entirely. I wanted the chemical processes in the brain to continue to function for another twelve minutes or so, giving the man’s soul a chance to operate the machinery for awhile longer. I believe in giving a man a chance to come to Jesus. I want him to have that last nanosecond to think about what it all meant. I was sure he was thinking about it now.

  I was also thinking, not about what it all meant, but more about the smell of blood and garlic coming off the guy, which combined scent molecules in such a way and juxtaposition as to make a lesser man puke. But I held it back. I’ve never been a puker, although I don’t discredit the many brave men I’ve know who were. Maybe I’d learned not to puke from slaughtering the hogs on Granny’s farm. Once you’ve taken in a healthy draught of hog blood combined with fresh hog shit, you are rendered impervious to any other odors which might someday come your way. So the blood and garlic didn’t bother me. And I’d smelled worse, in particular the smell of fish paste and blood from all the dead Charlie’s I’d wasted, too many times to count.

  Problem. I hadn’t been smooth, mainly because of the cigarette burn to my scalp, and as a result, I was covered in blood. It had to be taken philosophically. One cannot be a perfectionist. Perfectionism breeds pessimism. Because one never knows what the future holds, no matter how carefully one plans it. I, for example, hadn’t counted on having a cigarette fly to the top of my head. So remember, no matter what profession you’re in, whether it’s telemarketing or bagging groceries, don’t try to be perfect. Remember, there’s just no way to predict the outcome of your life at any given time. Because it’s in the little things comes the upsets. It always is.